Another major DeFi bridge has been compromised and Binance’s Ethereum-compatible blockchain is the target.
Binance Smart Chain (BSC) has been suspended after over a half of a billion dollars in BNB, the Binance ecosystem’s native token, was depleted from the official bridge.
BNB fell 5% once insight about the hack became public however has since pared a portion of its loses.
As per Zane Huffman, who works at Vesper Finance, a platform which gives clients admittance to out-of-the-box DeFi procuring systems, the hacker got 2M BNB tokens through the official BNB Chain (BSC) bridge. Igor Igamberdiev, a researcher noticed that the hacker signed up as a relayer for the bridge minutes before the exploit.
The stolen BNB is worth around $560M as of Oct. 6. The attacker then deposited BNB into Venus, a lending protocol on BSC, and borrowed 150M in stablecoins.
The attacker has since bridged some of those assets to multiple other chains — there are $53M in assets on Ethereum and almost $49M on Fantom as of 8pm ET, according to DeBank.
Blockchain Paused And Withdrawals Halted
In response to the hack, BSC’s Twitter account tweeted that the blockchain has been paused. The team also claims that only $70M to $80M in assets have been moved off-chain, which has observers asking about the remaining $400M-plus of BNB sitting in the attacker’s wallet.
.@BNBchain is currently under maintenance.
We will suspend all deposits and withdrawals via BNB chain temporarily until there are further updates.
We apologise for the inconvenience. Thank you for your patience!
— Binance (@binance) October 6, 2022
The attacker’s location however has been blacklisted by Tether, the issuer of the crypto’s biggest stablecoin USDT. Blacklisting isn’t new to DeFi yet highlights the degree of concentrated control that exists in the ecosystem, which contradicts crypto’s permissionless ethos.
Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange with $14.7B in trading volume in the past 24 hours, has suspended deposits and withdrawals on BSC. This makes it likely that the $430M of BNB left on BSC will remain inaccessible, leaving the hacker with roughly $100M in assets on other chains.
